Friday, January 23, 2009

Samsung / Sapient / Coca-Cola Dispenser

Does anyone know what sort of sensor they are using on this? It's an interesting concept, but seems destined for durability issues.

Doing some back of the napkin math...If the hardware lasts 12 months (probably less than that...), I'm guessing Coke would ask a ~$2000 markup on a standard machine (about twice the typical price) add in $500 in power consumption. That's $2500.

Say the bottles net $.65 each. The machine would need to sell 10 additional bottles a day to break even. Probably 20 to be worth the risk.

Makes sense in high circulation areas like airports and Disneyland, not so much for the office cafeteria.

5 comments:

I always think it's hilarious how companies keep experimenting with different vending machine designs when they never seem to add anything useful. I mean, it still just spits out a bottle/can of coke. That's it. We've had designs that work practically flawlessly for this purpose for decades. Yet, sometimes you see new designs pop up and not only don't they add anything, they actually often contain major flaws. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-xqVMnsyzU&feature=relatedhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Hr7mXpbrf8

So now they're saying you can select your choice on a touch screen. Woohoo. Unless they are going to use this to offer a much larger selection, or do something to make the experience more worthwhile rather than just slightly prettier, I don't see the point.

Yeah, fair enough, there are certainly vending machines out there that serve up enough products to make this a little more useful.

I just read on techblog that the owners can update the video and monitor stock via wifi, now THAT I can see being useful. It would also be cool if, when it's out of what you want, it just directs you to the nearest machine that has it.